iceland

My Favorite One-Week Summer Itinerary for Iceland

September 27, 2021

A friend of mine came over to Iceland for a week, so I planned a road trip. This road trip does require an off-road-capable vehicle, like a Dacia Duster or larger. Dusters are really common rentals, and you can get ’em with pop-up tents on the roof, but I wouldn’t recommend that, so my recommendations also include hotels. The First or Last Day: Lagoon Day Depending on your flight schedule, and whether you’re able to sleep on planes, you may want to start your Iceland experience with a spa day at one of Iceland’s famous lagoons: Blue Lagoon is the…

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Sold the Land Rover Defender.

September 14, 2021

cars, defender, iceland

Our adventure in Iceland is coming to an end, and we’re moving back to California at the end of this month. We can’t bring our Defender with us – the US makes it doggone near impossible to import a new-ish car from another country. We debated a lot about whether to build a vacation home in Iceland, and we even went so far as to buy a lot up in Siglufjörður. If we went through with building the house, we were going to keep the Defender in storage until the house was built, and then use it as our car.…

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Iceland Tourist Tips

June 1, 2021

iceland, travel

We’ve been living in Iceland for a few months now. I don’t wanna rehash the stuff you’ll find in typical tourist advice, but rather talk about stuff that I’d wanna hear if I was starting to plan a vacation to the land of fire and ice. Start your vacation planning with Mads Peter Iversen’s YouTube playlist. Mads Peter Iversen is a landscape photographer who extensively documents his work, and his videos give you better perspective for the size of the country and the kinds of attractions you’re interested in seeing. Sure, there are plenty of other attractions – whale watching…

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Epic Life Quest: Level 15 Completed.

May 27, 2021

iceland, life quest

Life’s little moments of success can pass us by so easily. If we don’t track the things we’re proud of, we lose track of how far we’ve come. Steve Kamb’s Epic Quest of Awesome inspired me to build my own Epic Life Quest. I keep track of achievements, and after five significant tasks, I level up. Yesterday, we finished off another 5 tasks for Level 15, and this feels like The Iceland Level. We moved to Iceland in January 2021, and we treated it as half vacation, half work. I alternate my time in sprints between work and play: 2-3 weeks in a rental…

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Things I Love About Teleworking in Iceland

April 20, 2021

iceland

We moved to Iceland in January to work remotely, and there’s a lot about it that feels like we’re living in the future. It’s an easy transition for Americans. Cars drive on the right side, English is spoken by enough folks in enough places, but the dominant language is still Icelandic, so it still feels like a foreign country. English is spoken, but rarely written – store signs are almost always in Icelandic, which presents a bit of a problem during the pandemic. I often find myself standing at a door, looking at a sign with a big wall of…

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How Iceland’s Dealing with COVID-19

February 17, 2021

covid19, iceland

When Erika & I started planning our move to Iceland last year, COVID-19 was by far and away the big motivation. We didn’t expect to be eligible for a vaccine in California anytime soon, so we wanted to socially distance somewhere for a while. Iceland’s a great place to socially distance because they have a low population density, great Internet connectivity (so I could keep working), and the government seemed to be taking COVID-19 pretty seriously right from the get-go. The government runs twice-weekly briefings. They’re very open about what challenges they’re facing and what solutions they’re considering. @Iceland_Review live-tweets…

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We Bought a New Land Rover Defender in Iceland.

February 15, 2021

cars, defender, iceland, land rover

When started planning to move to Iceland for a while, we had to decide what to drive – and we picked it out long before we got here. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Brent Ozar (@brento) If we were just staying in the capital city Reykjavik, we’d just rent a normal small car. However, we’re staying in a rental house in the countryside in the north of Iceland, and we’re staying during the winter. Even the long dirt driveway has hills that would challenge a regular small car. Our neighbor plows our driveway out with a…

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How to Get a Kennitala and an Electronic ID in Iceland (For US Citizens)

February 4, 2021

iceland

In Iceland, a kennitala is the equivalent of a US Social Security Number. It’s a personal identification number, and everybody’s got one. Kennitalas are required all over the place – getting a cell phone plan, opening a bank account, getting car insurance, even registering a TV for its warranty. An electronic ID builds atop that: it’s like a country-wide single-sign-on system that lets you authenticate for stuff and sign contracts. Apply for a kennitala before you fly to Iceland. You’re going to want to start this process at least a week before you arrive in Iceland if you wanna hit…

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How to Get Icelandic Teleworker Visas

January 22, 2021

covid19, iceland

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Brent Ozar (@brento) We made it into Iceland today with our brand new Icelandic teleworker visas! We wanted to move to Iceland for a while for a few reasons: they’re doing such an excellent job of controlling COVID-19, life is going on normally (bars & restaurants & museums are open), they have phenomenal internet connectivity (gig fiber everywhere), and it’s just a beautiful place to visit year-round. As Americans, if we want to get into Iceland, we have a few choices: Just drop in as a tourist for 90 days –…

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We’re Planning to Move to Iceland for a While.

October 19, 2020

iceland, travel

@brentozar #iceland #travel #glacier #ocean ♬ Landslide (Live on PBS in Boston 2004) – Fleetwood Mac Erika and I first visited Iceland for SQL Saturday 2019, and returned again in 2020. We had such a good time and loved the place so much that we started making plans to go for longer and longer periods of time. In mid-2020, we realized that the coronavirus situation was going to get a lot worse before it got better. I decided not to do any in-person client engagements or conferences until we could both be vaccinated, and that wasn’t going to come around…

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iceland

Hi. I’m Brent.